This invention pertains to the art of packaging and more particularly to nesting individual workpieces or articles in a base or pad member.
The invention is particularly applicable to the nesting of limited strength or deformable items and to nesting a plurality of workpieces of varying dimensional sizes such as engine bearings or the like in a deformable base member and will be described with particular reference thereto. However, it will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that the invention has far broader applications and may be equally applicable to use for nesting enumerable other articles, workpieces or the like in a deformable base member.
Heretofore, the packaging of limited strength items such as medicine bottles or the like has often been done in preformed rigid foam shell halves generally comprised of upper and lower shell halves. The shell halves are expensive to produce, must be specially ordered to size in advance and then inventoried. The cost associated with the shell halves greatly increase the total packaging costs from material, storage and manpower standpoints. Also, if different sized medicine bottles or the like are to be involved, entirely new premolded shell halves are required which greatly adds to packaging costs.
In the case of nesting a plurality of workpieces having various sizes, the packaging has either been done by hand requiring the use of special cartons and dunnage for separating, cushioning and so on or has been done automatically in a manner such as described in the commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,002,008. However, using the arrangement disclosed in this commonly assigned patent requires a separate run and handling for each of the different workpiece sizes. Thus, neither of the aforementioned packaging methods has been considered optimum from speed and cost points of view.
Accordingly, it is considered desirable to eliminate the necessity of hand packaging or the need for multi-run operations and to substantially automatically perform all the packaging or nesting steps in such an operation. In this regard, it is considered particularly desirable that all the packaging or nesting steps be completed on one single run through an apparatus and that human operators merely institute the initial process by loading or handling the workpieces which are to be nested in the base members. Such method and apparatus would greatly reduce the total number of operators required to obtain increased production output, eliminate the need for premolded shell halves or at least substantially all of the dunnage required in present manual packing processes, reduce the floor space heretofore required to inventory the special shell halves or dunnage and reduce the floor space required to accommodate the overall packaging or nesting operation.
The present invention contemplates a new and improved method and apparatus which is particularly applicable for nesting limited strength and deformable items or workpieces and for nesting a plurality of items or workpieces of various dimensional characteristics in a deformable base member. The present invention overcomes all of the above referred to problems and others and provides a new and improved method and apparatus for packaging which meet the above defined desirable features for an automated packaging system. The new and improved method and apparatus are also simple in design, economical to use, compact insofar as floor space utilization is concerned and readily adapted to use in a plurality of environments for packaging any number of different pieces or articles.